He should know. Michael Rosenblum has been around national TV newsrooms for decades. After a successful stint as a producer at CBS News, he left the network and established himself as a trailblazer in incorporating video via his digital videojournalist, or VJ, educational programs. His VJ training company has trained journalists here and abroad to shoot their own video. Rosenblum managed the conversion of The Voice of America, the United States Government’s broadcasting agency (and the largest broadcaster in the world), from short wave radio to television broadcasting. And, in his spare time, he conceived and founded Current TV and New York’s local NY1

So, Rosenblum speaks with some authority when he cites Dreadmonger’s favorite motivator, “Fear“, as the chief architect of the network nightly newscast that he knows so well.

Writing in his blog today, Rosenblum TV:

“It is an industry driven not by risk, but rather by fear. When I was at CBS News we used to call the place Cubicles of Fear. The reason was that the risks for any innovation were so high (if you tried something and it failed, they fired you), and the rewards so scanty. Unlike online start-ups, no one at CBS News got equity in CBS, so what was the reward for big growth? Nothing.”

Wow! What a bargain. ICANN (that’s the Internet Association for Assigned Names and Numbers, for the uninitiated) offers to sell Top Level Domain names (aka TLD‘s) for a mere $185,000.00. Buy two, they’re cheap.

Heralding “the most significant change to the Internet, really, since it was created,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN’s board of directors, in his understated style, introduced the new naming convention to the world. No more dot-com, dot-net nonsense, nosiree. The new convention allows companies to create a TLD in just about any format they can imagine.

“Once this is set up,” Thrush says, “the theory is, or the hope is, this is going to lead to innovation in ways we can’t imagine.” Thrush goes on to note that the fee is relatively modest. “It’s not the price of a domain name. This is to create a registry that … can sell and manage millions and even hundreds of millions of domain names. You’re talking a reasonably serious business investment.”

Wowzer!

Of course, others may take a more jaded view. Esther Dyson, internet pioneer and former founding chair of ICANN’s board, fails to see the value in the new naming system. “Nobody’s creating new value here,” Dyson says, “They’re just selling words … The trademark system is good enough.” The high price of the naming system, given that the existing dot-com system seems to work just fine, seems rather exorbitant.

Dyson goes on to say “I think it’s kind of a useless market and if I had $185,000, I’d spend it on something else.” She says this is an expensive solution for the wrong problem.

Dengate-Thrush, the ICANN board’s current chairman, insists what’s best for consumers is choice. To demonstrate his concern for consumers, Thrush and ICANN have established a tight and inflexible schedule for application submission.

It doesn’t hurt that this “choice” will potentially create a huge income stream.